If you’ve ever struggled with the task of composing a guest list for the ultimate fantasy dinner party, Laura Claridge’s biography of Blanche Knopf (née Wolf) will show you whom to put at the head of your table. That dream guest is, of course, Claridge’s subject: the petite, intense and, as Robert Gottlieb once put it, “fierce and exigent” co-founder of the great literary publishing house Alfred A. Knopf. She was an intuitive and visionary champion of contemporary authors, a voracious bookworm, a tireless hobnobber, a snappy dresser and a lifelong dog-lover (of tiny, fluffy ones, not of the imposing, austere borzoi she chose to grace the Knopf colophon, a breed she regarded as “cowardly, stupid, disloyal, and full of self-pity”).

To round out the notional gathering, you might wheedle the illustrious publisher into bringing along some of her devoted friends, from Thomas Mann, H.L. Mencken, Albert Camus and Muriel Spark to Langston Hughes, John Hersey and Willa Cather. Or you could invite one of her many musical boyfriends, a group that included (but was not limited to) Jascha Heifetz, Leopold Stokowski and Arthur Rubinstein. An added perk: You wouldn’t need to worry about entertainment. Her pals Paul Robeson and George Gershwin could be counted on to drop by and provide the music, while Blanche herself (and chums Helen Hayes and Anita Loos) could dance the Charleston, the Lindy Hop and the Black Bottom. In 1925, at one of her dinner parties, Blanche performed a spirited medley of all three while sporting a top hat and cane, prompting her husband and business partner, Alfred, to “applaud vigorously; even as the guests seemed unsure what to think.” This, Blanche’s biographer makes plain, was a rare instance of spousal approval.

The typical tenor of the couple’s rapport, Claridge establishes early on, was acrimonious. Indeed, the Knopf conference room seems to have resembled the living room in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (published by Knopf in 1962), with Blanche intentionally “nettling” Alfred, provoking him to shout, and Alfred “swooping down on her just as she thought there was an all-clear.” And yet the longtime Knopf board member Ralph Colin told an interviewer, “We were always sure Alfred was absolutely crazy about Blanche.” How did she feel about him? When she was on the road, she occasionally sent him notes with smiley faces. Claridge weaves them into her textured portrait as proof of the “innumerable swings in the marriage.” When the Knopfs were face to face, though, their dynamic was volatile at best. Yet somehow the marriage lasted and their business thrived. What kept them together? It’s perhaps more useful to ask what brought them together.

Blanche and Alfred, both children of prosperous New York Jewish families, met in the summer of 1911, when she was 17 and he almost 19, at a private club on Long Island’s South Shore. They started dating the next year, when Alfred was working as an office boy at Doubleday. Other courting couples speak of love; Alfred Knopf and Blanche Wolf spoke of books, specifically their vision of establishing their own publishing house, hewing to the highest standard. When they founded their company in 1915, Knopf promised his betrothed that her maiden name would be incorporated into the firm’s title, that she’d be treated as an equal partner. Following their marriage, in April 1916, he ignored that vow. After Blanche’s death, in 1966, he admitted he had never intended to honor it. Their publishing house would remain a one-man show, if only in name.

Blanche never forgave this betrayal. Although “infuriated,” as Claridge puts it, by her husband’s perfidy, Blanche nevertheless remained loyal to their shared vocation, if not to the marriage. (The same was true for her husband.) But as she courted and nurtured the writers who would bring honor to Knopf and Nobel Prizes to themselves, she seethed to watch her husband claim her laurels as his.

In 1921, Claridge reveals, during the couple’s first joint author-scouting trip to Europe, made on the heels of their firm’s successful fifth anniversary and almost three years after the birth of their only child, Alfred Knopf Jr. (known as Pat), Blanche was so unhappy she attempted suicide while visiting the country home of a British publisher. Claridge speculates that the episode may have “expressed Blanche’s despair at having been omitted from the Knopf five-year celebration, an omission that reverberated with industry people she met on this trip.” Whether or not this was the proximate cause, the biographer gives ample evidence of Blanche Knopf’s keen resentment of her husband’s annexation of her achievements.

The Knopfs’ continual clashes were not, to put it mildly, conducive to marital harmony. Just a few years later, Blanche would tell the Knopf author Carl Van Vechten (a close friend of both Knopfs) that she was “tired of sleeping with Alfred.” Very soon, she started taking lovers: some of them eminent, some not; one of them serious (a suave European named Hubert Hohe) and, much later, a strikingly handsome driver and self-­described “pimp for the Hollywood crowd” named Scotty Bowers, who also found dates for Alfred (though he thinks neither Knopf knew of his double duty). A butler who worked for both Knopfs noted that while “Alfred was discreet,” in Claridge’s paraphrase, “it was Blanche he respected.” “I admired her as I admired a tiger,” the butler added. “She got everything she wanted.” The biographer, possessing the fuller record, corrects this misimpression: “She didn’t, of course.”

What was it, one wonders, that made Blanche Knopf, who was so gifted, so insightful, so strong-willed, stay in a marriage that tormented herself and her partner? The British publisher Sir Robert Lusty suggested that “there existed between them a most touching devotion.” Could this have been enough? Really, such a conundrum is precisely why you yearn to have Blanche Knopf at the dinner table, so you could ask her yourself . . . if you dared.